I find this hard to believe. Left and Right are fundamentally motivated by different doctrines. Yes they both restrict freedoms but for different reasons. One thinks you can't disagree with people removing their genitals the other thinks you can't remove your genitals. Both restrictive but both fundamentally different. Edit. I'm obviously using a very topical example here.
Sorry, I haven't got a clue what you are talking about. I only gave my opinion and people can take it or leave it. It matters nothing to me
This is the fundamental point here I feel. What we might call the "mid-left" might be described as emphasising freedom and rights while the "mid-right" emphasises authority and duty. Those are quite different approaches but you go far enough down either of those roads and you end up with that restriction of freedoms.
The third point on this triangle is what we have now, which is almost unrestricted freedom and it's obviously failing.
I see the point you're making but I think that is more to do with the rise of new moralities which themselves have to fit on to the already existing political spectrum. Its difficult to place them though as some of them won't accept dissention or deviation, so might be described as authoritarian, while at the same time claiming that they are the epitome of liberalism.
I don't personally have a problem with authority, the best societies have it, it creates community cohesion and deters bad actors. I don't believe morality is universal either, most moral/societal changes in the last 75 years have been top down and not ground up, we're told to accept them rather than we tell the gov to legislate our desires. This makes our current society unnatural and even potentially illegitimate imo.
The SNP don't seem to have any policies. They're the Brexit Party of Scotland. Although I work alongside the SNP councillor for my village and she knows what she's doing, so the blind zealotry isn't all encompassing. It just seems to be a requirement to get to the top.
My best mate is Scottish and it’s really tough because 1 if I was a Scottish I’d be pissed that we got Tories because of the south. I even am as a northerner 2 I think nationalism is inherently bad and as you say you can’t be anti Brexit and pro Scottish independence can you? Somehow democracy has its faults though not sure of the answer but it isn’t blocking voters
I think respect for authority is important (see my earlier post about teachers, but also the Police, and other people in positions of authority that are intended to help the public). I'm not sure that an authoritarian government is necessarily a good thing. I'm also not sure that I agree with you about modern morals. I would consider most of that to come from the media and the general zeitgeist, which isn't government controlled and so, technically, not top down. I think the main problem with modern society is that it is too focused on the self, the individual. People, no matter what their political affiliation, regularly refer to their rights rather than their responsibilities. As I said with regard to Brexit, we all have to live together in this society so we should all make the effort to rub along together.
Media certainly play a part, interestingly for all the papers and outlets we have there are surprisingly few owners. Gov and media are linked for a myriad of reasons, BBC needs no explanation, but others toe the line or often just fall in line due to interests anyway, gov is obviously lobbied and often these lobby groups are manned by family members of the media. The culture post ww2 is certainly not organic, it has been carefully sculptured. As for individualism, of course the dialectic is individualism Vs collectivism and in our modern society the latter is considered bad.
I don't entirely agree with regard to the BBC. With the possible exception of their news output, I would have said that they lean towards the left and that means that they are not in step with the current government. It is their other output that is most likely to influence morality. The print media is more influenced by government/political affiliation but when I refer to the media, I'm also thinking of the Internet and social media. I think culture since the war has, to some extent, been heavily influenced by businesses and corporations due increased consumerism but I wouldn't go so far as to say it had been sculpted. The public will still reject things that it doesn't like. I'd agree that collectivism has been placed on the scrapheap, to everyone's detriment.
I think you're slightly off here, post ww2 a culture was built where we are in opposition to certain things (read between the lines) and initially this coexisted with healthy nationalism, the sort of things that were normal until maybe the 80s. Increasingly however positive sentiment towards the country has been depleted, perhaps due to becoming more and more multicultural and large swathes of the country not identifying with our history in any positive way. Now as a country we're fragmented and left with a culture that is based around what we oppose rather than what we are. There is no positive future as things stand. Collectivism is the future and is the only thing that will stem the tide, people born postwar and living today think the world is linear but infact they're living in a miraculously stable time in terms of progression and revolution. That's almost over in my estimation.
https://amp.theguardian.com/politic...ent-culture-after-record-number-of-foi-blocks Labour have criticised Sunak’s lack of transparency, saying it undermined the prime minister’s promise on taking office that he would run a government of “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”.
I agree with you that there is a tendency to define ourselves by what we oppose rather than what we love. Tim Minchin gave a very good speech about that a while back. I would also agree with you that positive sentiment towards our own country has been eroded. I don't think people should be castigated for being proud of being British or for wanting to preserve British customs and traditions. People who say "Churchill was a racist" and "the British Empire was evil" are looking at them through a very simplified, very narrow view of history. Those things have to be considered in a variety of contexts to truly understand them. As someone who studies the past for a living though, I would have said that multiculturalism is an inherently British characteristic. Our culture has adopted a myriad of things from around the globe. That's one of the positive things of being a former imperial power. The presence of people from around the world is also a strength and one of the responsibilities we have of being a former imperial power. The idea that we have to suppress any pride in Britain comes from within. In my opinion, we can embrace multiculturalism and celebrate Britishness at the same time.
Disagree strongly that multiculturalism is a British custom. For example all cultures take cuisine elements from places they come into contact with from the African use of Peanut coming from South America or the Irish Potato from South America, Italian Tomato coming from South America etc. These cuisines would be almost unrecognisable without those elements. Us having curry is not unique. Imperialism also was not the choice of fuedal citizens, for example my ancestors were either Irish or from a fishing village in the Pennines, they had no say as to what went on with the East India Company. Mass immigration is consistently unpopular on polls yet it never desists whether we have Labour or Tories at the helm. It's a bipartisan issue for politicians, which leads me to believe that the political class by and large have disdain for the English people.
People have been coming to these islands from other places since the Palaeolithic. All of the different incoming groups eventually, sometimes after periods of warfare, integrated with the pre-existing population. That has continued throughout recorded history. The British wouldn't be British without their Germanic, Norse, and Norman roots and during the Roman period, people from all over the Empire settled here. They didn't just disappear when Roman rule here ended in 410AD. Culture is more than just cuisine. Our language is a hybrid of several other European languages with significant borrowings from further afield (pyjamas, bungalow) and our system of government has been developed from ideas developed in places as far apart as Greece and Iceland. Even "traditional British" entertainments like Morris dancing originated elsewhere. Also, a fishing village in the Pennines?! Wasn't that a long way to drag the boats?
